The Difference Between Adults and Children

Although I spend my day surrounded by adults, observing adults, there are times when I feel I am immersed in some strange sort of day care system that I'm not told about, but it's a psych experiment and I'm the lab rat.

There is "The Kid" inside everyone of us. Call it your inner child or imp, whatever, but it's there, waiting to be let out of the woodshed we put it in when we become adults to perform shameful behavior in front of all and sundry for having kept it imprisoned for so long. It always comes out at the worst possible times and shows us for what we truly are. Because children have not yet learned to hide themselves, their true selves from everybody else, yet.

Every soul on this planet gets angry, gets hurt, and the first instinct is to lash out irrationally at the person or thing, or even idea, that has caused this shift in our personality paradigm. Some of us do, and others leash it back in, throw the brat back in the woodshed and try to rationally deal with the situation. It's the human condition played out billions of times each day on a planet teeming with humans.

Just think about your job. You can be sailing along, plugging away, doing your work, happily (or not) when someone upsets the apple cart and you get called in on the carpet by your boss about something. It could be something as simple as putting something in the wrong place in a warehouse where it's important that everything is in its place, to submitting somebody else's work as your own. Whatever it is, you are suddenly brought from one mood to another where you feel threatened by either a reprimand or being fired. It's high stress even if you're the fry cook at a fast food joint.

There are only two ways to deal with this, as an adult, rational and logical, or as a child, who immediately begins to blame everything and everyone around them for what is basically their fault. You've worked with these bozos, we all have. Suddenly a misplaced ball peen hammer is a conspiracy bigger than the Kennedy Assassination. The machinations behind the scenes are more Machiavellian than court intrigues of the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, childhood. And you stand there, watching this clown, thinking, it's just a freakin' hammer, dude.

Most of us would own up to it, accept it and apologize, and put it where it belongs. However, if you are predisposed to always being the victim, then you lash out, and begin justifying. Remember, Gentle Readers, rationalizing is when you lie to yourself. Justifying is when you lie to everyone else.

Take the politicians whose job it is to keep the ballot cattle happy in their pastures of poverty and despair. (What kind of job that has to be! I don't even think Mike Rowe would try that one.) Whisper in their ear that they are being blamed for just being born like they are, black, brown, black hair, freckles, whatever it takes to keep them in full fledged toddler tantrum mode. You're a victim and they're unfair and treating you badly. There is nothing quicker to put folks into a victimization mindset than being told they are being treated unfairly. It hearkens back to our childhood when we believe in fair and unfair and believe that everyone should be treated fairly. That it is possible.

You see, children are incapable of seeing things rationally. They are children and their brains are not developed enough and they do not have the life experience to see things as they truly are. We spend much of our childhood seeing things how we want them to be. It's a rare child who accepts reality as it truly is and operates from there. Usually that child has been damaged by reality and will always be serious, but firmly planted on the ground. That's another tale for another blog.

Children react to the first emotion, first thought that runs through their immature little transoms. They don't think to put the brakes on, because it's honest, for them. For a child, not an adult, and we learn that difference as we experience life through lost relationships and jobs thanks to an inability to put the brakes on our emotions and lose all perspective of reality.

Our biggest job in the upcoming decades, yes decades, is changing the mindset of the human beings kept in the Despair Factories, told they are victims and it's their right to be handed everything. Because we have 45 years of programming by the liberal elite to keep them down on the plantation pulling whatever lever they are told on election day. We won't reward them for their vote. We won't expect them to vote as we tell them.

However, we will see them be rewarded by a better standard of living once they shuck off the shackles of mental and philosophical slavery. We will be rewarded in a true establishment of self and esteem that grows from learning for yourself and doing a job that brings home money to pay for the things you want instead of having it handed to you undeservedly. It's going to be a very tough row to hoe.

Doing for yourself is not easy. Making a living in the world is not easy. But, it's satisfying as hell knowing that everything around you is really yours and can't be taken away by the whim of some child in congress. The undeserved things should be taken away. It's not my job to provide a roof over your head, food in your belly, and an ATM to take to the strip joints. That's your job, Bub. And changing their mind-set will be the hardest thing. I've worked with these people and their sense of entitlement is unbelievable. I know I've been at the point where the next person who said, "It's not my job" or "That's not in my job description" was going to get blasted by my inner brat. Talk about lashing out irrationally.

The only re-education needed will be for the inner child in all of us, to stop seeing it as a right to be handed something we haven't earned. We need to all stop the whining when we see someone get something we don't have, be happy for them and then decide how we're going to earn it for ourselves.

And go get ice cream after we have it!